And Team Shiva “wins.” Two of them we blow into ruin, but even as we fire the shot which disembowels the third, his last plasma bolt impacts on our glacis, and agony crashes through our brutally overloaded pain receptors. Massive armor tears like tissue, and we feel the failure of internal disrupter shields, the bright, terrible burst of light as plasma breaches our Personality Center.
In our last, fleeting instant of awareness, we know death has come for us at last, and there is no more sorrow, no more hate, no more desperation. There is only the darkness beyond the terrible light… and peace at last.
Stillness came to Ishark. Not out of mercy, for there had been no mercy here, no chivalry, no respect between warriors. There was only madness and slaughter and mutual destruction, until, at last, there was no one left to fight. No defenders, no attackers, no civilians. XLIII Corps never left Ishark, for there was no one to leave, and no Melconian division ever added the Battle of Ishark to its battle honors, for there was no one to tell the ghosts of Melcon it had been fought. There was only silence and smoke and the charred hulls of combat machines which had once had the firepower of gods.
And no one ever reported to the Republic that the very last battle of Operation Ragnarok had been a total success.
2
Jackson Deveraux squinted against the morning sun as he followed Samson down the fresh furrow. Dust rose from the stallion’s hooves, and Jackson managed not to swear as he sneezed violently. Spring had been dry this year, but Doc Yan predicted rain within the week.
Jackson was willing to take the Doc’s word for it, though he didn’t particularly understand how it all worked. Some of the older colonists were more inclined to doubt Yan, pointing out that he was down to only three weather satellites… and that none of them worked very well these days. Jackson knew the satellites’ eventual, inevitable loss would make prediction much harder, but he tended to keep his mouth shut about it around his parents’ generation lest he reveal just how vague was his understanding of why it would complicate things.
It wasn’t that Jackson was stupid. He was one of the best agronomists the colony had and the Deveraux Steading’s resident veterinarian, as well as a pretty fair people doctor in a pinch. But he was also only sixteen local years old, and learning what he needed to know to survive and do his part on Ararat hadn’t left time to study the applications of hardware the colony couldn’t possibly replace when it broke anyway. His older brother Rorie, the steading’s administrative head and chief engineer, had a better grasp of technical matters, but that was because he’d needed a different set of skills as a child. He’d been nineteen years old—standard years, not the eighteen-month long local ones—when the ships made their final orbit… and if the ships hadn’t finally found a habitable world, he would have been the only child their parents were allowed. Now he and Jackson had four more siblings and Rorie had seven children of his own, the oldest only a local year younger than Jackson.
Jackson had seen the visual records of the approach to the world which had been renamed Ararat. They retained enough tech base for that, though no one was certain how much longer the old tri-vids would continue to function, and a much younger Jackson had watched in awe as Ararat swelled against the stars in the bridge view screens of Commodore Isabella Perez’s flagship, the transport Japheth.
Of course, calling any of the expedition’s ships a “transport” was a bit excessive. For that matter, no one was certain Perez had actually ever been an officer in anyone’s navy, much less a commodore. She’d never spoken about her own past, never explained where she’d been or what she’d done before she arrived in what was left of the Madras System with Noah and Ham and ordered all two hundred uninfected survivors of the dying planet of Sheldon aboard. Her face had been flint steel-hard as she refused deck space to anyone her own med staff couldn’t guarantee was free of the bio weapon which had devoured Sheldon. She’d taken healthy children away from infected parents, left dying children behind and dragged uninfected parents forcibly aboard, and all the hatred of those she saved despite themselves couldn’t turn her from her mission.
It was an impossible task from the outset. Everyone knew that. The two ships with which she’d begun her forty-six-year odyssey had been slow, worn out bulk freighters, already on their last legs, and God only knew how she’d managed to fit them with enough life support and cryo tanks to handle the complements she packed aboard them. But she’d done it. Somehow, she’d done it, and she’d ruled those spaceborne deathtraps with an iron fist, cruising from system to system and picking over the Concordiat’s bones in her endless quest for just a few more survivors, just a little more genetic material for the Human race.
She’d found Japheth, the only ship of the “squadron” which had been designed to carry people rather than cargo, at the tenth stop on her hopeless journey. Japheth had been a penal transport before the War. According to her log, Admiral Gaylord had impressed her to haul cold-sleep infantry for the Sarach Campaign, although how she’d wound up three hundred light-years from there at Zach’s Hundred remained a mystery. There’d been no one alive, aboard her or on the system’s once-habitable world, to offer explanations, and Commodore Perez hadn’t lingered to seek any, for Noah’s com section had picked up faint transmissions in Melconian battle code.
She’d found Shem in Battersea, the same system in which her ground parties had shot their way into the old sector zoo to seize its gene bank. The Empire had used a particularly ugly bio weapon on Battersea. The sector capital’s population of two billion had been reduced to barely three hundred thousand creatures whose once-Human ancestry was almost impossible to recognize, and the half-mad, mutant grandchildren of the original zoo staff had turned the gene bank into a holy relic. The Commodore’s troopers had waded through the blood of its fanatic defenders and taken thirty percent casualties of their own to seize that gathered sperm and ova, and without it, Ararat wouldn’t have had draft or food animals… or eagles.
Like every child of Ararat, Jackson could recite the names of every system Perez had tried in such dreary succession. Madras, Quinlan’s Corner, Ellerton, Second Chance, Malibu, Heinlein, Ching-Hai, Cordoba, Breslau, Zach’s Hundred, Kuan-Yin… It was an endless list of dead or dying worlds, some with a few more survivors to be taken aboard the Commodore’s ships, some with a little salvageable material, and most with nothing but dust and ash and bones or the background howl of long-life radioactives. Many of the squadron’s personnel had run out of hope. Some had suicided, and others would have, but Commodore Perez wouldn’t let them. She was a despot, merciless and cold, willing to do anything it took—anything at all—to keep her creaky, ill-assorted, overcrowded rust buckets crawling towards just one more planetfall.
Until they hit Ararat.
No one knew what Ararat’s original name had been, but they knew it had been Melconian, and the cratered graves of towns and cities and the shattered carcasses of armored fighting vehicles which littered its surface made what had happened to it dreadfully clear. No one had liked the thought of settling on a Melconian world, but the expedition’s ships were falling apart, and the cryo systems supporting the domestic animals—and half the fleet’s Human passengers—had become dangerously unreliable. Besides, Ararat was the first world they’d found which was still habitable. No one had used world burners or dust or bio agents here. They’d simply killed everything that moved—including themselves—the old-fashioned way.